Officials

Umpires

The principle of having two umpires officiating a cricket match goes back is something attested to in the earliest records of the game, in particular, In Certamen Pilae, dated 1706. There would appear to be two good reasons for this. One is to enable them to each officiate at one end of the wicket, the other is that if each team provided an umpire, they could act as a mutual checking and verification system.

They would invariably be depicted as carrying cricket bats, and this persisted into the nineteenth century. The initial reason is believed to be that to complete a run, a batsman would have to touch his bat on a stick or bat held by the umpire. Presumably, the fielding side could run the players out by getting the ball to the umpire’s stick first. This was replaced by the popping crease in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the bats persisted, presumably because they lent the officials an air of authority.

The first full code of laws we have dates to 1744. However, there must have been something to guide umpires before that. There would have been local rules no doubt, but many scholars suspect the existence of formalisation of rules from the early days of the 1700s.

Scorers

Introduction

Look at most pictures of a pre-1800 cricket field and scorers will feature prominently. Fashionably dressed and conspicuously placed, often on the field itself, they form a major part of the mise-en-scène. Above is a fragment of an engraving, supposedly of cricket at Sevenoaks, of a pair of scorers, one keeping the score on a stick and the other keeping a watchful eye on the accuracy of his work.

Scoring methods

As is widely known, scores were recorded by making a mark on the stick for each run; hence, runs were sometimes referred to as notches, although more frequently, runs are called runs. The stick method would have been used to save the cost of paper, which was an expensive article at the time. The method was rudimentary, though; it did not offer any information other than the team score. As cricket grew in favour with the monied classes and gambling on matches became prevalent, more sophisticated methods were employed. Famously, in the match between Surrey and Sussex v London in 1744, a scorecard was found in the papers of Lord John Sackville, who captained the Kent team. There must have been some basic scoring system in use which enabled individual scores to be kept.

This, however, was an outlier. Scorecards before 1770 are rare in the extreme. None have survived the many games played by the London Cricket Club at The Artillery Ground. Haygarth records only one match before 1771, that between England and Kent in what he says was 1746 but was, in fact, 1744. The first book of cricket scores, Grand Matches of Cricket by William Epps starts with 1771.

It is possible to discern the movement in scoring systems from the Laws. The 1774 code of laws specifies that, in the context of gambling, ‘If the notches of one player are laid against another, the bet depends on both innings, unless otherwise specified.’ This tells us that betting on individual scores was becoming prevalent, and so a system was necessary to establish this data in a reliable way. That may well have been the end of the scoring stick, at least at the highest level, with presumably recreational cricket following on.

The Scorer – William Davies of Sussex by Thomas Henwood, 1842